NELSON GOODMAN
WORDS,
WORKS,
WORLDS*
1. QUESTIONS
Countless worlds made f r o m nothing by use of symbols - so might a
satirist summarize some of Cassirer's major themes. These themes - the
multiplicity of worlds, the speciousness of 'the given', the creative power
of the understanding, the variety and formative function of symbols - are
also integral to m y own thinking. Sometimes, though, I forget that they
have been so eloquently set forth by Cassirer, 1 partly perhaps because his
emphasis on myth, his concern with the comparative study of cultures,
and his talk of the h u m a n spirit have been mistakenly associated with
current trends toward mystical obscurantism, anti-intellectual intuitionism, or anti-scientific humanism. Acutally these attitudes are as alien to
Cassirer as to m y own skeptical, analytic, constructionalist orientation.
M y aim in what follows is less to defend certain theses that Cassirer
and I share than to take a hard look at some crucial questions they raise.
In just what sense are there m a n y worlds? W h a t distinguishes genuine
from spurious worlds? W h a t are worlds made of? H o w are they made,
and what role do symbols play in the making? And how is worldmaking
related to knowing? These questions must be faced even if full and final
answers are far off.
2. VERSIONS AND VISIONS
As intimated by William James's equivocal title A Pluralistic Universe,
the issue between monism and pluralism tends to evaporate under analysis. I f there is but one world, it embraces a multiplicity of contrasting
aspects; if there are m a n y worlds, the collection of them all is one. The
one world may be taken as many, or the m a n y worlds taken as one;
whether one or m a n y depends on the way of taking.
Why, then, does Cassirer stress the multiplicity of worlds? In what
important and often neglected sense are there m a n y worlds? Let it be
Erkenntnis 9 (1975) 57-73. All Rights Reserved
Copyright 9 1975 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordr~cht-Holland
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NELSON GOODMAN
clear that the question here is not of the possible worlds that m a n y of m y
contemporaries, especially those near Disneyland, are busy making and
manipulating. We are not speaking in terms of multiple possible alternatives to a single actual world but of multiple actual worlds. H o w to
interpret such terms as "real", "unreal", "fictive", and "possible" is a subsequent question.
Consider, to begin with, the fact that the statements "the sun always
moves" and "the sun never moves", though equally true, are at odds with
each other. Shall we say, then, that they describe different worlds, and
indeed that there are as m a n y different worlds as there are such mutually
exclusive truths? Rather, we are inclined to regard the two strings of words
not as complete statements with truth-values of their own but as elliptical
for some such statements as " U n d e r frame of reference A, the sun always
moves" and " U n d e r frame of reference B, the sun never moves" - statements that m a y both be true of the same world.
Frames of reference, though, belong less to what is described than to
systems of description; and each of the two statements relates what is
described to such a system. I f I ask about the world, you can offer to tell
me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that
you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are
confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe, so to
speak, consists of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds.
The alternative descriptions of motion, all of them in much the same
terms and routinely transformable into one another, provide only a
minor and rather pallid example of diversity in accounts of the world.
Much more striking is the vast variety of versions and visions in the several
sciences, in the works of different painters and writers, and in our perceptions as informed by these, by circumstances, and by our own insights,
interests, and past experiences. Even with all illusory or wrong or dubious
versions dropped, the rest exhibit new dimensions of disparity. Here we
have no neat set of frames of reference, no ready rules for transforming
physics, biology, and psychology into one another, and no way at all of
transforming any of these into Van Gogh's vision, or Van Gogh's into
Canaletto's. Such of these versions as are depictions rather than descriptions have no truth-value in the literal sense, and cannot be combined
by conjunction. The difference between juxtaposing and conjoining two
statements has no evident analogue for two pictures or for a picture and
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
59
a statement. The dramatically contrasting versions of the world can of
course be accommodated by relativization: each is right under a given system - for a given science, a given artist, or a given perceiver and situation.
Here again we turn from describing or depicting 'the world' to talking of
descriptions and depictions, but now without even the consolation of
intertranslatability among or any evident organization of the several
systems in question.
Yet doesn't a right version differ from a wrong one just in applying to
the world, so that rightness itself depends upon and implies a world? On
the contrary, 'the world' depends upon rightness. We cannot test a version
by comparing it with a world undescribed, undepicted, unperceived, but
only by other means that I shall discuss later. While we may speak of
determining what versions are right as 'learning about the world', 'the
world' supposedly being that which all right versions describe, all we
learn about the world is contained in right versions of it; and while the
underlying world, bereft o f these, need not be denied to those who love it,
it is perhaps on the whole a world well lost. For some purposes, we may
want to define a relation that will so sort versions into clusters that each
cluster constitutes a world and the members of the cluster are versions of
that world; but for many purposes, right world-descriptions and worlddepictions and world-perceptions, the ways-the-world-is, or just versions
can be treated as our worlds. 9
Since the fact that there are many different world-versions is hardly
debatable, and the question how many if any worlds-in-themselves there
are is virtually empty, in what non-trivial sense are there, as Cassirer and
like-minded pluralists insist, many worlds? Just this, I think: that many
different world-versions are of independent interest and importance,
without any requirement or presumption of reducibility to a single base.
The pluralist, far from being anti-scientific, accepts the sciences at full
value. His typical adversary is the monopolistic materialist or physicalist
who maintains that one system, physics, is preeminent and all-inclusive,
such that every other version must eventually be reduced to it or rejected
as false or meaningless. If all right versions could somehow be reduced to
one and only one, that one might with some semblance of plausibility a
be regarded as the only truth about the only world. But the evidence for
such reducibility is negligible, and even the claim is nebulous since physics
itself is fragmentary and unstable and the kind and consequences of
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NELSON GOODMAN
reduction envisaged are vague. (How do you go about reducing Constable's or James Joyce's world-view to physics2) I am the last person
likely to underrate construction and reduction. 4 A reduction from one
system to another can make a genuine contribution to understanding the
interrelationships among world-versions; but reduction in any reasonably
strict sense is rare, almost always partial, and seldom if ever unique. To
demand full and sole reducibility to physics or any other one version is to
forego nearly all other versions. The pluralists' acceptance of versions
other than physics implies no relaxation of rigor but a recognition that
standards different from yet no less exacting than those applied in science
are appropriate for appraising what is conveyed in perceptual or pictorial
or literary versions.
So long as contrasting right versions not all reducible to one are
countenanced, unity is to be sought not in an ambivalent or neutral
something beneath these versions but in an overall organization embracing
them. Cassirer undertakes the search through a cross-cultural study of the
development of myth, religion, language, art, and science. My approach
is rather through an analytic study of types and functions of symbols and
symbol systems. In neither case should a unique result be anticipated;
universes of worlds as well as worlds themselves may be built in many
ways.
3. H o w
FIRM A F O U N D A T I O N ?
The non-Kantian theme of multiplicity of worlds is closely akin to the
Kantian theme of the vacuity of the notion of pure content. The one
denies us a unique world, the other the common stuff of which worlds are
made. Together these theses defy our intuitive demand for something
stolid underneath, and threaten to leave us uncontrolled, spinning out
our own inconsequent fantasies.
The overwhelming case against perception without conception, the
pure given, absolute immediacy, the innocent eye, substance as substratum, has been so fully and frequently set forth - by Berkeley, Kant,
Cassirer, Gombrich, 5 Bruner, 6 and many others - as to need no restatement here. Talk of unstructured content or an unconceptualized given
or a substratum without properties is self-defeating; for the talk imposes
structure, conceptualizes, ascribes properties. Although conception without perception is merely empty, perception without conception is blind
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
61
(totally inoperative). Predicates, pictures, other labels, schemata, survive
want o f application, but content vanishes without form. We can have
words without a world but no world without words or other symbols.
The many stuffs - matter, energy, waves, phenomena - that worlds are
made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from
nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it
always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.
Anthropology and developmental psychology may study social and
individual histories of such world-building, but the search for a universal
or necessary beginning is best left to theology. 7 My interest here is rather
with the processes involved in building a world out of others.
With false hope of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced
by worlds that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function,
and with the given acknowledged as taken, we face the questions how
worlds are made, tested, and known.
4. W A Y S OF WORLDMAKING
Without presuming to instruct the gods or other world makers, or attempting any comprehensive or systematic survey, I want to illustrate and
comment on some of the processes that go into worldmaking. Actually,
I am concerned more with certain relationships among worlds than with
how or whether particular worlds are made from others.
(a) Composition and Decomposition
Much but by no means all worldmaking consists of taking apart and putting together, often conjointly: on the one hand, of dividing wholes into
parts and partitioning kinds into subspecies, analyzing complexes into
component features, drawing distinctions; on the other hand, of composing
wholes and kinds out of parts and members and subclasses, combining
features into complexes, and making connections. Such composition and
decomposition is normally effected or assisted or consolidated by the
application of labels: names, predicates, gestures, pictures, etc. Thus, for
example, temporally diverse events are brought together under a proper
name or identified as making up 'an object' or 'a person'; or snow is
sundered into several materials under terms of the Eskimo vocabulary.
Metaphorical transfer - for example, where taste predicates are applied
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to sounds - m a y effect a double reorganization, both re-sorting the new
realm of application and relating it to the old one.
Identification rests upon organization into entities and kinds. The
response to the question "same or not the same?" must always be "same
what?", s Different soandsos may be the same such-and-such: what we
point to or indicate, verbally or otherwise, may be different events but the
same object, different towns but the same state, different members but
the same club or different clubs but the same members, different innings
but the same ball game. 'The ball-in-play' of a single game may be comprised of temporal segments of a dozen or more baseballs. The psychologist asking the child to judge constancy when one vessel is emptied into
another must be careful to specify what constancy is in question - constancy of volume or depth or shape or kind of material, etc. 9 Identity or
constancy in a world is identity with respect to what to what is within
that world as organized.
Motley entities cutting across each other in complicated patterns m a y
belong to the same world. We do not make a new world every time we
take things apart or put them together in another way; but worlds may
differ in that not everything belonging to one belongs to the other. The
world of the Eskimo who has not grasped the comprehensive concept of
snow differs not only from the world of the Samoan but also from the
world of the New Englander who has not grasped the Eskimo's distinctions. In other cases, worlds differ in response to theoretical rather than
practical needs. A world with points as elements cannot be the Whiteheadian world having points as certain classes o f nesting volumes, or
having points as certain pairs of interesting lines or as certain triples of
intersecting planes. That the points of our everyday world can be equally
well defined in any of these ways does not mean that a point can be identified in any one world with a nest of volumes and a pair of lines and a
triple of planes; for all these are different from each other. Again the
world of a system taking minimal concrete phenomena as atomic cannot
admit qualities as atomic parts o f these concreta. 1~
Repetition as well as identification is relative to organization. A world
m a y be unmanageably heterogeneous or unbearably monotonous according to how events are sorted into kinds. Whether or not today's experiment
repeats yesterday's, however much the two events m a y differ, depends upon
whether they test a c o m m o n hypothesis; as Sir George T h o m s o n puts it:
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
63
There will always be somethingdifferent... What it comes to when you say you repeat an
experiment is that you repeat all the features of an experiment which a theory determines arerelevant. In other words you repeat the experiment as an example of the theory,it
Likewise, two musical performances that differ drastically are nevertheless
performances of the same work if they conform to the same score. The
notational system distinguishes constitutive from contingent features,
thus picking out the performance-kinds that count as works, tz And things
'go on in the same way' or not according to what is regarded as the same
way; 'now I can go on', 13 in Wittgenstein's sense, when I have found a
familiar pattern, or a tolerable variation of one, that fits and goes beyond
the cases given. Induction requires taking some classes to the exclusion
o f others as relevant kinds. Only so e.g., do our observations of emeralds exhibit any regularity and confirm that all emeralds are green
rather than that all are grue (i.e. examined before a given date and
green, or not so examined and blue), t4 The uniformity of nature we
marvel at or the unreliability we protest belongs to a world of our own
making.
In these latter cases, worlds differ in the relevant kinds comprised in
them. I say "relevant" rather than "natural" for two reasons: first, "natural" is an inapt term to cover not only biological species but such artificial
kinds as musical works, psychological experiments, and types of machinery; and second, "natural" suggests some absolute categorical or psychological priority while the kinds in question are rather habitual or traditional
or devised for a new purpose.
(b)
Weighting
While we may say that in the cases discussed some relevant kinds of one
world are missing from another, we might perhaps better say that the two
worlds contain just the same classes sorted differently into relevant and
irrelevant kinds. Some relevant kinds of the one world, rather than being
absent from the other, are present as irrelevant kinds; some differences
among worlds are not so much in entities comprised as in emphasis or
accent, and these differences are no less consequential. Just as to stress
all syllables is to stress none, so to take all classes as relevant kinds is to
take none as such. In one world there may be many kinds serving different
purposes; but conflicting purposes may make for irreconcilable accents
and contrasting worlds, as may conflicting conceptions of what kinds
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serve a given purpose. Grue cannot be a relevant kind for induction in
the same world as green; for that would preclude some of the decisions,
right or wrong, that constitute inductive inference.
Some of the most striking contrasts of emphasis appear in the arts.
Many o f the differences among portrayals by Daumier, Ingres, Michelangelo, and Rouault are differences in aspects accentuated. What counts
as emphasis, of course, is departure from the relative prominence accorded
the several features in the current world of our everyday seeing. With
changing interests and new insights, the visual weighting of features of
bulk or line or stance or light alters, and yesterday's level world seems
strangely perverted - yesterday's realistic calendar landscape becomes a
repulsive caricature.
These differences in emphasis, too, amount to a difference in relevant
kinds recognized. Several portrayals of the same subject may thus place
it according to different categorical schemata. Like a green emerald and
a grue one, even if the same emerald, a Piero della Francesca Christ and a
Rembrandt one belong to worlds organized into different kinds.
Works of art, though, characteristically illustrate rather than name or
describe relevant kinds. Even where the ranges of application - the things
described or depicted - coincide, the features or kinds exemplified or
expressed may be very different. A line drawing of softly draped cloth
may exemplify rhythmic linear patterns; and a poem with no words for
sadness and no mention of a sad person may in the quality of its language
be sad, and poignantly express sadness. The distinction between saying
or representing on the one hand and showing or exemplifying on the other
becomes even more evident in the case of abstract painting and music and
dance that have no subject-matter but nevertheless manifest - exemplify
or express - forms and feelings. Exemplification and expression, though
running in the opposite direction from denotation - that is, from the
symbol to a literal or metaphorical feature of it instead of to something
the symbol applies to - are no less symbolic referential functions and
instruments of worldmaking. 15
Emphasis or weighting is not always binary as is a sorting into relevant
and irrelevant kinds or into important and unimportant features. Ratings
of relevance, importance, utility, value often yield hierarchies rather than
dichotomies. Such weightings are also instances of a particular type of
ordering.
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
(c)
65
Ordering
Worlds not differing in entities or emphasis may differ in ordering; for
example, the worlds of different constructional systems differ in order of
derivation. As nothing is at rest or is in motion apart from a frame of
reference so nothing is primitive or is derivationally prior to anything
apart from a constructional system. However, derivation unlike motion
is of little immediate practical interest; and thus in our everyday world,
although we almost always adopt a frame of reference at least temporarily,
we seldom adopt a derivational basis. Earlier I said that the difference between a world having points as pairs of lines and a world having lines as
composed of points is that the latter but not the former admits as entities
nonlinear elements comprised within lines. But alternatively we may say
that these worlds differ in their derivational ordering of lines and points
of the not-derivationally-ordered world of daily discourse.
Orderings of a different sort pervade perception and practical cognition.
The standard ordering of brightness in color follows the linear increase
in physical intensity of light; but the standard ordering of hues curls the
straight line of increasing wavelength into a circle. Order includes periodicity as well as proximity; and the standard ordering of tones is by pitch
and octave. Orderings alter with circumstances and objectives. Much
as the nature of shapes changes under different geometries, so do perceived patterns change under different orderings; the patterns perceived
under a twelve-tone scale are quite different from those perceived under
the traditional eight-tone scale, and rhythms depend upon the marking off
into measures.
Radical reordering of another sort occurs in constructing a static image
from the input from scanning a picture, or of a unified and comprehensive
image of an object or a city from temporally and spatially and qualitatively
heterogeneous observations and other items of information. 16 Some very
fast readers recreate normal word-ordering from a series of fixations that
proceed down the left-hand page and then up the right-hand page of a
book. 17 And spatial order in a map or a score is translated into the
temporal sequence of a trip or a performance.
All measurement, furthermore, is based upon order. Indeed, only
through suitable arrangements and groupings can we handle vast quantities of material perceptually or cognitively. Gombrich discusses the
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decimal periodization of historical time into decades, centuries, and
millennia, is Daily time is marked off into twenty-four hours, and each of
these into sixty minutes of sixty seconds each. Whatever else may be said
of these modes of organization, they are not 'found in the world' but
built into a world. Ordering, as well as composition and decomposition
and weighting of wholes and kinds, participates in worldmaking.
(d) Deletion and Supplementation
Also, the making of one world out of another usually involves some
extensive weeding out and filling in - actual excision of some old and
supply of some new material. Our capacity for overlooking is virtually
unlimited, and what we do take in usually consists of significant fragments
and clues that need massive supplementation. Artists often make skilful
use of this; a lithograph by Giacometti fully presents a walking man by
sketches of the head, hands, and feet only in just the right postures and
positions against an expanse of blank paper, and a drawing by Katharine
Sturgis conveys a hockey player in action by a single charged line.
That we find what we are prepared to find, what we look for or what
forcefully affronts our expectations, that we are blind to what neither
serves nor counters our interests, is a commonplace of everyday life and
is amply attested by psychological experiments. 19 In the painful experience of proofreading and the more pleasurable one of watching a skilled
magician, we incurably miss something that is there and see something
that is not there. Memory edits more ruthlessly; a person with equal
command of two languages may remember a learned list of items while
forgetting in which language they were listed. ~0 And even within what
we do perceive and remember, we dismiss as illusory or negligible what
cannot be fitted into the architecture of the world we are building.
The scientist is no less drastic, rejecting or purifying most of the entities
and events of the world of ordinary things while generating quantities
o f filling for curves suggested by sparse data, and erecting elaborate
structures on the basis of meagre observations. Thus does he build a
world conforming to his chosen concepts and obeying his universal
laws.
Replacement of a so-called analog by a so-called digital system involves
deletion in the articulation of separate steps; for example, to use a digital
thermometer with readings in tenths of a degree is to recognize no temper-
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
67
ature as lying between 90 and 90.1 degrees. Similar deletion occurs under
standard musical notation, which recognizes no pitch between c and c #
and no duration between a sixty-fourth and a one-hundred-and-twentyeighth note. On the other hand, supplementation occurs when, say, an
analog replaces a digital instrument for measuring mileage, or when a
violinist performs from a score.
Perhaps the most spectacular cases of supplementation, though, are
found in the perception of motion. Sometimes motion in the perceptual
world results from intricate and abundant fleshing out of the physical
stimuli. Psychologists have long known of what is called the 'phi phenomenon': under carefully controlled conditions, if two spots of light are
flashed a short distance apart and in quick succession, the viewer normally
sees a spot of light moving continuously along a path from the first position to the second. That is remarkable enough in itself since of course the
direction of motion cannot have been determined prior to the second flash;
but perception has even greater creative power. Paul Kolers has recently
shown 21 that if the first stimulus spot is circular and the second square,
the seen moving spot transforms smoothly from circle to square; and
transformations between two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes
are often effected without trouble. Moreover, if a barrier of light is interposed between the two stimulus spots, the moving spot detours around
the barrier. But what happens if the first flash is, say, red and the second
pink (or blue)? Kolers and yon Griinau z2 have found that, almost incredibly, while the seen spot moves and transforms its shape smoothly
as before, it stays red to about the middle of the path and then abruptly
changes to pink (or blue)! Just why these supplementations occur as they
do is a fascinating subject for speculation. 23
(e) Deformation
Finally, some changes are reshapings or deformations that may according
to point of view be considered either corrections or distortions. The
physicist smooths out the simplest rough curve that fits all his data. Vision
stretches a line ending with arrowheads pointing in while shrinking a
physically equal line ending with arrowheads pointing out, and tends to
expand the size of a smaller more valuable coin in relation to that of a
larger less valuable one. 24 Caricaturists often go beyond overemphasis to
actual distortion. Picasso starting from Velasquez's Las Meninas, and
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NELSON GOODMAN
Brahms starting from a theme of Haydn's, work magical variations that
a m o u n t to revelations.
These then are ways that worlds are made. I do not say the ways. M y
classification is not offered as comprehensive or clearcut or mandatory.
N o t only do the processes illustrated often occur in combination but the
examples chosen sometimes fit equally well under more than one heading;
for example, some changes m a y be considered alternatively as reweightings or reorderings or reshapings or as all of these, and some deletions
are also matters of differences in composition. All I have tried to do is to
suggest something of the variety of processes in constant use. While a
tighter systematization could surely be developed, none can be ultimate;
for as remarked earlier, there is no more a unique world of worlds than
there is a unique world.
5. T R O U B L E W I T H T R U T H
With all this freedom to divide and combine, emphasize, order, delete,
fill in and fill out, and even distort, what are the objectives and the constraints? What are the criteria for success in making a world?
Insofar as a version is verbal and consists of statements, truth may be
relevant. But truth cannot be defined or tested by agreement with 'the
world'; for not only do truths differ for different worlds but the nature
of agreement between a version and a world apart from it is notoriously
nebulous. Rather - speaking loosely and without trying to answer either
Pilate's question or Tarski's - a version is true when it offends no unyielding beliefs and none of its own precepts. A m o n g beliefs unyielding
at a given time may be long-lived reflections of laws of logic, short-lived
reflections of recent observations, and other convictions and prejudices
ingrained with varying degrees of firmness. A m o n g precepts, for example,
may be choices a m o n g alternative frames of reference, weightings, and
derivational bases. But the line between beliefs and precepts is neither
sharp nor stable. Beliefs are framed in concepts informed by precepts;
and if a Boyle ditches his data for a smooth curve just missing them all, we
may say either that observational volume and pressure are different properties from theoretical volume and pressure or that the truths about
volume and pressure differ in the two worlds of observation and theory.
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
69
A n d the staunchest belief tends in time to admit alternatives; "the earth
is at rest" passed from d o g m a to dependence upon precept.
Truth, far f r o m being a solemn and severe master, is a docile and obedient servant. The scientist who supposes that he is single-mindedly
dedicated to the search for truth deceives himself. He is unconcerned with
the trivial truths he could grind out endlessly; and he looks to the multifaceted and irregular results of observations for little more than suggestions of overall structures and significant generalizations. He seeks system,
simplicity, scope; and when satisfied on these scores he tailors truth to
fit. 2~ H e as much decrees as discovers the laws he sets forth, as much
designs as discerns the patterns he delineates.
Truth, moreover, pertains solely to what is said, and literal truth solely
to what is said literally. We have seen, though, that worlds are made not
only by what is said literally but also by what is said metaphorically, and
not only by what is said either literally or metaphorically but also by
what is exemplified and expressed - by what is shown as well as what is
said. In a scientific treatise, only literal truth may count; but in a poem or
novel, metaphorical or allegorical truth m a y matter more, for even a
literally false statement m a y be metaphorically true 26 and may m a r k or
make new associations and discriminations, change emphases effect exclusions and additions. And statements whether literally or metaphorically true or false may show what they do not say, m a y work as trenchant
literal or metaphorical examples of unmentioned features and feelings.
In Vachel Lindsay's The Congo, for example, the pulsating pattern of
drumbeats is insistently exhibited rather than described.
Finally, for nonverbal versions and even for verbal versions without
statements, truth is irrelevant. We risk confusion when we speak of
pictures or predicates as "true o f " what they depict or apply to; they have
no truth-value, and m a y represent or denote some things and not others,
while a statement does have truth-value and is true of everything if of
anything. 27 And a nonrepresentational picture such as a Mondrian says
nothing, denotes nothing, pictures nothing, and is neither true nor false,
but shows much. Nevertheless, showing or exemplifying, like denoting,
is a referential function; and much the same considerations count for
pictures as for the concepts or predicates of a theory: their relevance and
their revelations, their force and their fit - in sum their rightness. Rather
than speaking of pictures as true or false we might better speak of theories
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as right or wrong; for the truth of the laws of a theory is but one special
feature and is often, as we have seen, overridden in importance by the
cogency and compactness and comprehensiveness, the informativeness
and organizing power of the whole system.
" T h e truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" would thus
be a perverse and paralyzing policy for any worldmaker. The whole truth
would be too much; it is too vast, variable, and clogged with trivia. The
truth alone would be too little, for some right versions are not true - being
either false or neither true nor false - and even for true versions rightness
m a y matter more.
6. R E L A T I V E REALITY
Shouldn't we now return to sanity from all this m a d proliferation of
worlds? Shouldn't we stop speaking of right versions as if each were, or
had, its own world, and recognize all as versions of one and the same
neutral and underlying world? The world thus regained, as remarked
earlier, is a world without kinds or order or motion or rest or pattern - a
world not worth fighting for or against.
We might, though, take the real world to be that of some one o f the
alternative right versions (or groups of them bound together by some
principle of reducibility or translatability) and regard all others as versions
of that same world differing from the standard version in accountable ways.
The physicist takes his world as the real one, attributing the deletions,
additions, irregularities, emphases, of other versions to the imperfections
of perception, the urgencies of practice, or poetic license. The phenomenalist regards the perceptual world as fundamental, and the excisions, abstractions, simplifications and distortions of other versions as resulting
from scientific or practical or artistic concerns. F o r the man-in-the-street,
most versions from science, art, and perception depart in some ways from
the familiar serviceable world he has jerry-built from fragments of
scientific and artistic tradition and from his own struggle for survival.
This world, indeed, is the one most often taken as real; for reality in a
world, like realism in a picture, is largely a matter of habit.
Ironically, then, our passion for o n e world is satisfied, at different times
and for different purposes, in m a n y different ways. N o t only motion,
derivation, weighting, order, but even reality is relative. And so also, of
course, is fiction, for so long as one world is designated as real, one version
WORDS, WORKS, WORLDS
71
or integrated group of versions as the standard of reality, differing versions are considered to be at least in part either false or figurative, and
ontological disparities to be the result of omitting real or adding fictive
entities. Incidentally, with one world designated as real, merely-possible
worlds might naturally be identified with divergent true or right versions;
but for some contemporary philosophers, merely-possible worlds seem
rather to be identified with false versions or 'state-descriptions' constructed from the same vocabulary as the only true one.
That reality is relative, worlds and right versions many, does not imply
that all alternatives are equally good for every or indeed for any purpose,
or that every alternative is much good for some purpose or other, and
by no means precludes preference among versions. N o t even a fly is
likely to take one of his wing-tips as a fixed point; we do not welcome
molecules or concreta as elements of our everyday world, or combine
tomatoes and triangles and typewriters and tyrants and tornadoes into a
single kind; the physicist will count none of these among his fundamental
particles; the painter who sees like the man-in-the-street will have more
popular than artistic success. And the same philosopher who here metaphilosophically contemplates a vast variety of worlds finds that only
versions meeting the demands of a dogged and deflationary nominalism
suit his purposes in constructing philosophical systems.
Moreover, while readiness to recognize alternative worlds may be
liberating, and suggestive of new avenues of exploration, a willingness to
welcome all worlds builds none. Mere acknowledgement of the m a n y
available frames of reference provides us with no m a p of the motions of
heavenly bodies; acceptance of the eligibility of alternative bases produces
no scientific theory or philosophical system; awareness of varied ways of
seeing paints no pictures. A broad mind is no substitute for hard work.
7. N O T E S ON K N O W I N G
W h a t I have been saying bears on the nature of knowledge. On these
terms, knowing cannot be exclusively or even primarily a matter of
determining what is true. Discovery often amounts, as when I place a
piece in a jigsaw puzzle, not to arrival at a proposition for declaration or
defense, but to finding a fit. Much of knowing aims at something other
than true, or any, belief. An increase in acuity of insight or in range of
72
NELSON GOODMAN
c o m p r e h e n s i o n , rather t h a n a change in belief, occurs when we find in a
pictured forest a face we already knew was there, or learn to distinguish
stylistic differences a m o n g works already classified b y artist or c o m p o s e r
or writer, or study a picture or a concerto or a treatise u n t i l we see or
hear or grasp features a n d structures we could n o t discern before. Such
growth i n knowledge is n o t b y f o r m a t i o n or fixation of belief ~8 b u t b y the
a d v a n c e m e n t of u n d e r s t a n d i n g . 29
F u r t h e r m o r e , if worlds are as m u c h m a d e as f o u n d , so also k n o w i n g is
as m u c h r e m a k i n g as reporting. All the processes of w o r l d m a k i n g I have
discussed enter into k n o w i n g . Perceiving m o t i o n , we have seen, often
consists in p r o d u c i n g it. Discovering laws involves drafting them. Recognizing patterns is very m u c h a m a t t e r o f i n v e n t i n g a n d i m p o s i n g them.
C o m p r e h e n s i o n a n d creation go o n together.
I m a y n o t have given adequate answers to the questions I raised at the
start; a n d you m a y feel that I have used far too freely all the processes
I have described, f r o m d e c o m p o s i t i o n t h r o u g h deletion to distortion.
But even if y o u feel that what I have said is n o t true, I hope y o u m a y
find some o f it right.
Harvard University
NOTES
* Written for delivery at the meeting in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of
Ernst Cassirer, held at the University of Hamburg on October 21, 1974.
1 E.g. in Language and Myth, translated by Suzanne Langer (Harper, 1946).
2 Cf. 'The Way the World Is' (1960), in my Problem and Projects [hereinafter PP]
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), pp. 24-32.
a But not much; for no one type of reducibility serves all purposes.
4 Cf. 'The Revision of Philosophy' (1956), inPP, pp. 5-23; and also my The Structure
of Appearance [hereinafter SA] (Bobbs-Merrill, second ed., 1966).
5 In Art andlllusion (Pantheon Books, 1960), E. H. Gombrich argues in many passages
against the notion of 'the innocent eye'.
6 See the essays in Jerome S. Bruner's Beyond the Information Given [hereinafter B1],
ed. by Jeremy M. Anglin (W. W. Norton, 1973), Chapter I.
7 Cf. SA, pp. 127-145; and 'Sense and Certainty' (1952) and 'The Epistemological
Argument' (1967), in PP, pp. 60-75. We might take construction of a history of successive development of worlds to involve application of somethinglikea Kantian regulative
principle, and the search for a first world thus to be as misguided as the search for a
first moment of time.
a This does not, as sometimes is supposed, require any modification of the Leibniz
WORDS, WORKS, W O R L D S
73
formula for identity, but merely reminds us that the answer to a question "Is this the
same as that?" may depend upon whether the "this" and the " t h a t " in the question
refer to thing or event or color or species, etc.
9 See BI, pp. 331-340.
10 See further SA, pp. 3-22, 132-135, 142-145.
it In 'Some Thoughts on Scientific Method' (1963), in Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science, Vol. II (Humanities Press, 1965), p. 85.
t2 See my Languages of Art [hereinafter LA], (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), pp. 115-130.
la Discussion of what this means occupies many sections, from about Section 142 on,
of Ludwig Wittgenstein'sPhilosophicaIInvestigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe,
(Blackwell, 1953). I am not suggesting that the answer I give here is Wittgenstein's.
14 See my Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Bobbs-Merrill, third ed., 1973), pp. 72-80.
x5 On exemplification and expression as referential relations see LA, pp. 50-57, 87-95.
16 See The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch (Cambridge, Technology Press, 1960).
17 See E. Llewellyn Thomas 'Eye Movements in Speed Reading', in Speed Reading:
Practices and Procedures (University of Delaware Press, 1962), pp. 104-114.
is In Zeit, Zahl, und Zeichen, written for delivery at the meeting mentioned in the
asterished note above.
x9 See 'On Perceptual Readiness' (1957) in BI, pp. 7-42.
2o See Paul Kolers, 'Bilinguals and Information Processing', Scientific American 218
(1968), 78-86.
21 Aspects of Motion Perception (Pergamon Press, 1972), pp. 47ff.
z2 This result is reported in 'Visual Construction of Color is Digital', forthcoming in
Science. I am grateful to the authors, in the Department of Psychology at the University
o f Toronto, for permission to cite this paper prior to its publication.
2a I plan to write a paper 'Essay on a New Fact of Vision', on this matter.
aa See 'Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception' (1947), in BI, pp. 43-56.
z5 See 'Science and Simplicity' (1963), in PP, pp. 337-346.
26 See LA, pp. 51, 68-70.
27 E.g. " 2 + 2 = 4 " is true of everything in that for every x, x is such that 2 + 2 = 4 .
A statement S will normally not be true about x unless S is about x in one of the senses
o f " a b o u t " defined in 'About' (PP, pp. 246-272); but definition of "about" depends essentially on features of statements that have no reasonable analogues for pictures.
as I allude here to Charles S. Peirce's paper 'The Fixation of Belief' (1877), in Collected
Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Harvard University Press, Vol. 5 (1934), pp. 223-247.
29 On the nature and importance of understanding in the broader sense, see M.
Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, University of Chicago Press (1960).